


On Stranger's Feet I Mark My Ground

by sharptoothed



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Almost Everyone Is A Lesbian, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Butch/Femme, F/F, G-d knows where this'll go, Gender or Sex Swap, Genderbending, Slow Burn, We'll just see where the tide takes us folks!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-18
Updated: 2017-11-14
Packaged: 2018-12-31 04:39:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 8,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12124692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sharptoothed/pseuds/sharptoothed
Summary: The woman sitting across from Jack oozes elegance. Her hair is pulled back in a tight, formal bun, and the hem of her finely tailored skirt falls politely just under the knee. Her suit jacket meets her shirt cuffs precisely at the edges, exposing delicate silver cufflinks that appear to be engraved with her initials. Will didn’t even know they made women’s cufflinks.She looks up, and her deep brown gaze makes it past the rim of Will’s glasses and directly into her eyes, and Will swallows, hard. Christ.Will Graham lives in the woods with her dogs and would like to be left well the hell alone. Annabel Lecter does not intend to oblige her. Self-indulgent canon-divergent genderbend; starts at Apéritif and I guess we'll all see where it goes.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hi. Welcome to lesbian NBC Hannibal, brought to you by your local butch dyke. I'll be your host this evening, and I guess every other evening I post something.
> 
> I don't pretend to know where this story's going to end up (except I know there will one hundred percent be gay love, thanks) so strap in and see if we can collectively hold me accountable to actually writing something decent.
> 
> Title is from "Our Purpose Here" by Ferron.
> 
> Thanks.

Will Graham can think of at least twenty things she’d rather do than go to work this morning.

It’s not that she doesn’t like teaching, because she does, usually. It’s not even that she doesn’t like working for the Bureau, because she does, usually. It’s that some mornings the last thing you want to do is have to contend with your obnoxious students (who will look at you like you’re an alien and wonder what’s wrong with you instead of listening to the lecture) and every other person in the building who will try to dig into your brain like an earwig and find out as much as they can before they die in there. She’s incongruous among the women of the FBI, an unshaven freak sporting a cheap men’s haircut and Goodwill plaid in rooms full of crisp skirt suits and heels, and in an ideal world she would stay home with her dogs and maybe catch a fish for lunch and not worry about anything besides binging  _ Deadliest Catch  _ or something similarly mindnumbing.

Instead Will puts her boots on and gets in the car.

For a little while she feels lucky. She successfully avoids people and ducks into the quiet enclave of her office, leaving the blinds facing the hallway shut. Pictures of the dogs adorn the desk like snapshots of children; there’s a Johnny Cash poster on the wall like a college dorm room. These are, ostensibly, her office hours, but she can count on one hand the number of times a student has actually attempted to make use of them in five years of teaching, and not one of them has ever returned after the first visit. So she kills time instead, banging out a few words on the latest monograph in between rounds of Minesweeper, and then makes her slightly less weary way to class.

She’s just wrapping up an uneventful lecture covering the last case she worked -- an ugly one, involving a double murder followed by the rape of a victim not-quite-dead -- when a senior agent walks in, oozing authority, and the vague ideas for the evening floating around her mind dissolve into a laserlike focus on the rim of her glasses.

“Willa Graham?”

Will flinches automatically. Willa, like Willa Cather (a deliberate reference, believe it or not), but also Willa like when you’re expecting a son and have to name your daughter on the fly. Willa like a cheap insurance salesman’s unimaginative drag name. “Will.”

“Will. Special Agent Jack Crawford.” The woman smiles, and the conspiratorial gleam in her eye, the hope for rapport, is so obvious that Will barely keeps herself from cringing. “Short for Jacqueline.”

“We’ve met.”

The smile turns wan. “Yes, we, ah…had a disagreement about the museum when we opened it.”

“Not about the museum. Just about what you named it.”

“The Evil Minds Research Museum.”

_ “Evil Minds? _ It’s a little hammy.”

The corner of Agent Crawford’s mouth twitches, just a little, and there’s a touch of irritation there, but she’s laughing at herself nonetheless. “You’ve hitched your horse to a teaching post,” she announces, changing the subject. “I understand it’s not easy for you to be sociable.” Will shrugs, and before she knows it --  _ don’t you fucking dare -- _ Crawford has reached forward and edged her glasses up the bridge of her nose, forcing her to look her in the eye. With all the patient condescension of a high school counselor, she inquires, “Where do you fall on the spectrum?”

_ Are you crazy or just a retard?  _ “My horse,” Will replies, voice leaning into Crawford’s slow cadence, “is hitched closer to Asperger’s and autistics than narcissists and sociopaths.”

“But you can empathize with narcissists and sociopaths.”

“I can empathize with anybody.” She neglects to mention that empathizing with Crawford right now is making her want to commit suicide from annoyance. “Less to do with personality disorders than an active imagination.”

Crawford beams.

“Can I borrow your imagination?”

 

-

 

Twenty minutes later she’s being thoroughly briefed on a chain of serial abductions eight girls long, stretching through the Midwest. The eighth victim, Will learns, has only just been discovered, the impetus for Agent Crawford marching into her classroom. The girls vanish from college campuses on Fridays, spend weekends languishing God knows where, and then are reported missing the following Monday. Pretty girls. Dark-haired, fair-complected, usually blue-eyed. Some of the pictures could pass for Will at that age, if Will had had any clue how to work with makeup. They’re all a stand-in for something, someone. Something loathed, or something beloved. Will works it out and explains it, piece by piece, and Crawford watches her intently, and finally declares, “I’d like you to get closer to this.”

Will blinks. “You have Heimlich at Harvard and Bloom at Georgetown. They do the same thing I do.”

“You have a specific way of thinking.”

Will’s lip curls, involuntarily. She fields at least a call a week from various psychiatrists, begging to know what makes the freak tick. “Has there been a lot of discussion about the way I think?”

“You make jumps you don’t explain.”

“The  _ evidence  _ explains.”

“Then help me find some more evidence.”

Will sighs.

“That may require me to be sociable.”

 

-

 

She goes home that night and dreams, fitfully, of nine placid, smiling, Mall of America corpses. The last one, waxed and plucked and doll-like, is her own.

 

-

 

The Nichols case is, in a word, messy.

The parents are hard to deal with. The father is scared and angry and invasive, and it takes more than Will’s snapping to get him out of her way; Jack has to pull him out of the room along with his unfed cat, the room where his daughter lays dead, pristine and perfect in her white nightgown save the gore cavities along her torso. All Will can feel, standing alone with her, is raw, terrible love. She feels like her skin’s come off and she’s pulsing, naked, exposed, trying to show Elise everything she would do for her, how much she loves her, trying to swallow her whole. Elise is alive and Will is choking the breath from her, watching her perfect face turn forget-me-not blue, her ribs cracking as Will pins her harder to the mattress with one knee,  _ I LOVE YOU, I LOVE YOU, CAN’T YOU SEE THAT I LOVE YOU, DON’T YOU FUCKING LEAVE ME -- _

“You’re Willa Graham!”

Will shakes back into herself, startled, and has to struggle for breath for a moment, can’t find it in herself to correct the name. “You’re -- you’re not supposed to be in here.”

A pretty woman in a white lab coat is regarding her with some amusement, but it’s clear she’s impressed. “You wrote the standard monograph on time of death by insect activity.” She holds up her tweezers. “I found antler velvet in two of the wounds. You, uh. Not real FBI?”

_ Embarrassing. _ God. She stumbles over explanation. “St-strict screening procedures.”

“Detects instability.” The woman grins. “You unstable?”

Jack storms in barking orders, and the rest is a blur. The first woman is apparently Beverly Katz. Her accomplices arrive in short order, and they’re talking about deer and elk and Will can’t really see straight and doesn’t really listen, and finally manages to say that the killer was trying to  _ heal  _ her, that he’d done it all wrong, he was  _ sorry. _

They look at her like she’s a crazy person. 

“Does anyone have any aspirin?”

 

-

 

The day drags on. Will’s head is killing her. The flight back to Dulles is long, and the drive home is longer, and she’s got highway hypnosis and at least three-quarters of a migraine and figures her eyes must be playing tricks on her when she sees a dog, and she pulls over anyway, and suddenly none of it matters.

She takes him home and cleans him up and names him Winston, and he sits politely in his crate and looks at his new family.

Will lets out a long, slow breath.  _ Easy. _

 

-

 

She gets to sleep with minimal tossing and turning, and around two in the morning realizes there’s a woman in bed with her. Something in Will almost wants to skip the fearful investigation and just curl in close to a warm body, but she forces her eyes open anyway and immediately has to bury a scream in her chest. She’s staring directly into the cold, open eyes of Elise Nichols. She’s not breathing, she’s dead, she’s just the way Will left her, and Will reaches out and then the stag or the elk or the Christ fucking knows hooks her tight in the chest and drags her away, bloodied, into the shadows, and Will fights to grab at her like she’s underwater and striving for air.

Instead she wakes up, soaked in sweat and alone.  _ Dreaming. It was a dream.  _ Shaking, she retrieves a worn towel from the closet and lays it down on the bed, shivering from the cold and damp, trying to stay warm. Fuck.

 

-

 

She must look shaken at work, because Jack corners her in the restroom while she’s washing her hands and forces her into a lengthy talk about her mental health, how she needs to be  _ stable  _ and  _ present  _ and  _ in the saddle,  _ and Will is half-listening and half-pondering her boss’ propensity for horse metaphors. She’s angry, for some reason, under the irritation. Jack doesn’t understand and can’t be made to, no matter how Will tries to explain the simple fact that their killer, whomever he is, loves his victims so deeply that he can’t bear to see them, or whatever they represent, alive and away from him. He can’t honor them, can’t love them, can’t get it right. Will’s fingers twitch with his frustration. She feels like she’s carrying him under her skin.

Whatever she says, she says it right, because for the next few days Jack leaves her alone and lets her work. She’s fine enough for the job.

Until, that is, she comes face-to-face again with Elise Nichols.

The body’s been cut open. Katz and her team -- Price and Zeller, apparently -- have gone over the whole thing, top to bottom, and Will feels like she’s looking at what’s left of a pig before the butcher really gets started. There’s a cold stone of fear or sickness or  _ something _ in the pit of her stomach. The antlers sprout out of her, again, like the roots of a plant growing upside-down, and Will almost wants to throw up, she’s bleeding, she’s --

“She wasn’t gored.” Zeller rolls her eyes.

“She has lots of piercings that look like they were caused by deer antlers,” Katz retorts. “I didn’t say the  _ deer  _ put them there.”

“She was mounted on them,” Will says faintly.

They look at her like a psychopath for a minute and turn back to their work. “Her liver was removed,” Zeller points out. “He took it out and put it back in.”

The man under her skin moves. Gesticulates. Will twitches a little.

“Why cut out her liver if he was just going to sew it back in again?” Price demands.

Will  _ knows,  _ God, she knows. “Something was wrong with the meat.”

Zeller blinks. “She has liver cancer.”

God, God, God. Cold horror. Her mouth moves as if someone else is making it, as if she’s a puppet on a string. She doesn’t want to say it. “He’s eating them.”


	2. Chapter 2

Because Will is clearly stupid, she expects her appointed meeting with Jack to be conducted in privacy. She is, as usual, wrong. Jack looks like she’s trying to break the news to a six-year-old that Mommy and Daddy are getting divorced. Across the desk from her, beside an empty chair clearly intended for Will, is an ash-blonde woman of maybe forty-five, tall and decorous, sitting pin-straight in her chair. Where Jack is visibly uncomfortable, her face is smooth and expressionless, exuding perfect, impenetrable calm.

The woman oozes elegance. Her hair is pulled back in a tight, formal bun, and the hem of her finely tailored skirt falls politely just under the knee. Her suit jacket meets her shirt cuffs precisely at the edges, exposing delicate silver cufflinks that appear to be engraved with her initials. Will didn’t even know they made women’s cufflinks.

She looks up, and her deep brown gaze makes it past the rim of Will’s glasses and directly into her eyes, and Will swallows, hard. _Jesus Christ._

“Will,” Jack says, clearing her throat, “This is Dr. Annabel Lecter. She’ll be helping us with profiling for the rest of the case.”

Lecter smiles warmly. “Charmed.” She has a cool, even voice and a clipped accent, something unplaceably European. Not Russian, not German. Something else. Will’s running the options in her mind when she realizes Dr. Lecter’s still looking at her, and manages an abrupt nod before sitting down hard, self-conscious.

“Tell me then,” Lecter begins, turning back to Jack as if they’d never been interrupted, “How many confessions?”

“Twelve dozen last time I checked,” Jack grumbles. “Some genius in Duluth PD took a picture of Elise Nichols’ body with their phone and shared it with a few close friends. Freddie Lounds ran it on Tattlecrime.com.”

“Tasteless,” Will hisses, and she almost doesn’t realize she’s said it aloud until Lecter turns to her, head cocked like a curious bird.

“Do you have trouble with taste?”

Will blinks. _Is she fucking with me?_ No, Lecter’s face is all genuine interest, lit up like she’s found a diamond where she expected a rock. Will feels like an object. “My thoughts are not often _tasty.”_

“Nor mine,” Lecter replies with a smile. “No effective barriers.”

“I build forts.”

“Associations come easy.”

“So do forts.”

“Not fond of eye contact, are you?”

Oh Jesus. Will avoids eye contact harder.

“Eyes are distracting,” she snips. “You see too much, you don’t see enough. And it’s hard to focus when you’re thinking _wow,_ _those whites are really white_ or _they must have hepatitis,_ or _is that a burst vein?_ So I try to avoid eyes whenever possible.”

Lecter’s too polite to laugh, but her eyes do it for her, crinkling at the edges in a way you could describe as pretty, if you were into that sort of thing. Which Will is _not._ “I imagine,” she purrs, “what you see and learn touches everything else in your mind. Your values and decency are present yet shocked at your associations, appalled at your dreams. No forts in the bone arena of your skull for things you love.”

Will’s blood turns to ice. “Whose profile are you working on?” She turns away hard from Lecter to stare Jack angrily in the face. _Helping us with profiling._ Bullshit. _Bullshit._ “Whose profile is she working on?” she barks.

Lecter’s brow furrows in a sort of feigned apology. It doesn’t help her case. All Will can feel is ugly betrayal. “I’m sorry, Will.” She tries to feed her some bullshit line about how neither of them can turn off intuition or observation or something else similarly moronic, but Will’s already halfway out the door, and all she can manage is a snarl of, “You won’t like me when I’m psychoanalyzed,” before she slams it in both of their faces and storms out to the car. She thinks she said something about teaching a lecture. Too fucking bad for them. Class is cancelled. She drives home furious, barely braking once the whole way there, and stays out with the dogs for a long time.

 

-

 

Crows are eating her body like they’re invited guests.

She’s a young woman. She matches the profile. She’s been impaled, naked, upon the horns of a stag, and it’s ugly, and there’s no love in it.

“I feel like I’m dreaming,” Will mumbles.

“The head was reported stolen last night about a mile from here,” Jack reports.

“Just the head?”

Katz and her team are trying to shoo the crows off the body, to little success. Will may or may not be having an out-of-body experience. There’s so much _hate_ here, so much _mockery,_ compared to the love for Elise Nichols that took Will out of her skin. Will feels warped and sick and ugly just standing on the ground.

“Minneapolis homicide has already made a statement,” Jack reports. “They’re calling him the Minnesota Shrike.”

Price rattles off some facts about shrikes for the class. Will drops to her knees, both trying to breathe and examine the body further. God, she might throw up. She didn’t feel anything like this with Nichols, this is different. This is someone else.

“I almost feel like he’s mocking her. Or mocking us.”

“Where’d all his love go?” Jack inquires, almost sadly.

Will shakes her head. “Whoever tucked Elise Nichols into bed didn’t paint this picture. This is someone else.”

Zeller informs them that the victim’s lungs were removed while she was still breathing, and Will has to turn away from the whole thing. The disgust overwhelms her.

“Our cannibal _loves_ women,” she says firmly. “He doesn’t want to destroy them. He wants to consume them. Keep some part of them inside. This girl’s killer thought she was a _pig.”_ She almost spits the last word. She can feel every bit of the killer’s loathing pervading her, making her into whatever he is, however he feels. Women, maybe people in general, are livestock. She’s never fought empathy like this before. She doesn’t want to feel how this bastard feels, doesn’t want to know how he did it. She’s taking the bare minimum from the air and trying to spin gold out of it, trying to save herself from having to plunge any deeper into this fucking mess.

“You think this is a copycat?” _No shit._

“Dunno.” She steps back a little bit, examines the horrific tableau in front of her. “Cannibal who killed Elise Nichols had a place to do it and no interest in… _field Kabuki._ He has a house or two, or a cabin. Something with an antler room.” Fuck, fuck. She shakes her head a little. It’s coming together now, the picture of the Shrike swimming to the forefront of her mind. Clear as day. “He has a daughter,” she tells Jack, “same age as the other girls. Same hair color, same eye color, same height, same weight. She’s an only child. She’s leaving home. He can’t stand the thought of losing her. She’s his Golden Ticket.” He loves her, he loves her, he loves her, Will loves her too. She hugs herself a little like she’s clinging to that perfect girl, trying to press her inside of herself.

“What about the copycat?”

Will shrugs, rattles off something clinical about intelligent psychopathy. She’s still preoccupied with her daughter who’s not her daughter, now that she can seize upon who and what she is. She strides off toward the edge of the field and swings herself under the police tape.

“Have Dr. Lecter write up a psychological profile,” she shrugs. “You seem very invested in her opinion.”

 

-

 

That night Will dreams of a tremendous feathered stag. It is so black it could be carved from obsidian, and it lowers its head to her as though bowing and snorts lowly, acknowledging her presence, unafraid. She is not afraid of it either.

The stag moves forward, slowly, and Will notes the delicacy of its hooves on the ground. She reaches a hand out to touch it, and it’s coming closer. From this distance she can see Elise Nichols’ blood drying on its horns, and she is still not afraid of it; they are linked to each other, part of each other. Its gaze doesn’t move once from her face, and it --

_Knock-knock-knock-knock-knock._

It startles and looks up, suddenly, like it’s heard the firing of a gun.

_Knock-knock-knock-knock-knock._

The stag bolts.

Will stirs and starts awake, grinding the last dregs of sleep from her eyes with the heel of her hand. It’s clear someone is actually knocking at the door. The clock reads 7:25 AM. _Who are you and what the hell is your problem,_ is what she wants to ask; what actually comes out of her mouth is, “Coming.”

She opens the door still in her pajamas. Squinting and shielding her eyes from the bright light pervading the room, she can make out Dr. Lecter, smiling much too warmly for the hour and bearing with her a steaming Pyrex container in each hand. Will is suddenly acutely aware of the fact that she’s standing there in boxers and a T-shirt, and then even more aware of the fact that she’s naked from the thigh down and hasn’t shaved her legs since she was twelve.

“Good morning, Will. May I come in?” Not Willa. Will.

“Where’s Crawford?”

“Deposed in court, I’m afraid,” Lecter hums, looking for all the world like the cat who ate the canary. Probably looking forward to trying to poke through Will’s brain again. “The adventure will be yours and mine today.”

They stare at each other in silence for a moment. Lecter blinks.

“May I come in?”

Will shuffles aside, holding the door open, and Lecter steps in delicately, as though she’s entering a ballroom instead of a grungy motel. She scans the room for a moment and then sets her dishes down on the table, throwing open the curtains in an impressive cloud of dust.

Will would really like to put on some pants. Instead, Lecter pulls out a chair for her like a maître d’, and Will sits down in it like a child and pulls herself close to the table. Will expects her to sit down across from her and start eating, like a normal person, but this is a performance, and it must be perfectly executed.

Tucked into Lecter’s overcoat, apparently, are full place settings -- mats, utensils, cloth napkins. She lays down one set in front of Will and the other across the table, ensuring everything is in its proper place; the forks and knives are so carefully set that Will could probably measure their placements to the degree with a protractor. There’s a coffee maker in the room, but Lecter pours coffee from a steel thermos instead, still steaming hot despite the trip over and smelling better than anything Will’s ever consumed. She places a container in front of Will and one on her own placemat and finally sits down, popping the lid off her dish and taking a satisfied bite of what look to be scrambled eggs.

“I’m very careful about what I put into my body,” Lecter purrs, “which means I end up preparing most meals myself.” She gestures at the dishes. “A little protein scramble to start the day. Some eggs, some sausage.”

She watches very closely, catlike, while Will opens her dish, takes a bite, chews, swallows. It really is very good. Will tries not to make too much noise.

“It’s delicious. Thank you.”

The corner of Lecter’s mouth only quirks slightly, but her eyes light up. “My pleasure.” She clears her throat a little, taking another bite. “I would apologize for my analytical ambush…”

_Fuck’s sake, here we go._

“But I know that I would soon be apologizing again, and you’ll tire of that eventually, so I have to consider using apologies sparingly.”

She really does sound genuinely sorry. Will sighs. “Just keep it professional.”

“Or we could socialize like adults,” Lecter suggests. A-dults, emphasis on the first syllable. Where the hell does that accent come from? “God forbid we become friendly.” Where the hell has she gotten the idea that Will is _friendly?_

Will looks up at her, slowly, analyzing. Lecter is looking directly back at her with that same bright, birdlike gleam in her eye as the first day. The doctor genuinely seems to want to connect with her. A desire for friendship, maybe some hint, unbelievably, of attraction.

Will vastly prefers forts to bridges.

“I don’t find you that interesting.”

Lecter’s undeterred. “You will.”

They look at each other for a moment.

“Agent Crawford tells me you have a knack for the monsters.”

Will sighs, hard. “That’s a superstition.”

“I called your good friend Dr. Bloom about you,” Lecter hums, between bites. There is clearly nothing that’s going to tear her off the let’s-talk-about- _you_ -Will track. “She wouldn’t gossip, not a word,” she says, almost winking. Will’s never exactly been the type to be invited into gossip circles. “She’s very protective of you. _Smitten,_ I would say. She asked me to keep an eye on you.”

Will really does not need to hear insinuations about how the beautiful, presumably heterosexual Alana Bloom must just be head over heels for the ugly office bulldagger. She really doesn’t. Especially from a woman who looks like this. All she can do is scowl and change the subject.

“I don’t think the Shrike killed that girl in the field.”

“The devil is in the details,” Lecter agrees calmly, and if she minds Will’s interruption she doesn’t show it. “What didn’t your copycat do to the girl in the field? What gave it away?”

“Everything. It’s like he had to show me a negative to give me a positive. That crime scene was practically gift-wrapped.”

“The mathematics of human behavior,” Lecter muses. “All those ugly variables. Some bad math with this Shrike fellow. Are you reconstructing his fantasies? What kind of problems does he have?”

“He has a few,” Will deadpans. Lecter smiles.

“Ever have any problems, Will?” she replies, in that same lilting, almost teasing tone.

“No.”

“Of course you don’t. You and I are just alike.” _I fucking doubt it._ “Problem-free. Nothing about us to feel horrible about.”

Will is exactly one hundred percent sure she’s being made fun of.

“I think Auntie Jack sees you as a fragile little teacup.” Will is less sure, now. “The finest china used only for special guests.”

Will actually laughs out loud. The sound is rusty and strange and goes on far too long, and it makes Lecter actually grin, but not cruelly. She’s not being mocked; Lecter is trying to laugh with her, not at her, and has finally gotten around the brick wall.

“How do _you_ see me?”

Lecter’s serious now. Her smile softens. “The mongoose I want under the house when the snakes slither by.”

The words make Will’s chest feel warm and strange, and she quiets, shrinking into herself a bit in discomfited embarrassment.

Lecter nods.

“Finish your breakfast.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter is where things should begin to diverge.


	3. Chapter 3

The “adventure” is a trip to a construction site to look up employees. Katz found a shred of metal on Elise Nichols’ clothes, and so off Will goes to its place of origin to find out who put it there.

The car crunches on the gravel as she throws it into park. She’s unbuckling her seatbelt, reaching around to the backseat to grab her briefcase, and stops short when she catches Dr. Lecter watching her, that same warm, amused smile on her face.

“What are you smiling about?”

Lecter grins. “Peeking behind the curtain. I’m curious about how the FBI goes about its business when it isn’t kicking in doors.”

Will’s lips quirk a little, ruefully. “You’re lucky we’re not doing house-to-house interviews. We found a little piece of metal in the clothes Elise Nichols had on -- a shred from a pipe threader.”

“Jack Crawford wants me to make sure you’re of sound mind and body...to look for metal pipe threaders?”

Will actually does smile then, snickering under her breath. “That’s between you and Jack.”

“That it is.” Lecter nods. “There must be hundreds of construction sites all over Minnesota.”

“Well, certain kinda metal, certain kinda pipe, certain kinda pipe coating. So we’re looking at construction sites that use that kinda pipe.”

“And what are we looking for?”

Will shrugs. “Anything, at this stage. But mostly anything peculiar.”

They get out of the car and head into the trailer that serves as an office. The secretary is suspicious, clearly displeased that they’re there, but she has no choice but to give them permission to rifle through her files, accompanied by much irritable muttering to a friend on the phone. Will flicks through a collection of resignation letters while she whispers about whether they have permission to do it or not. Dr. Lecter holds the boxes.

Nothing, nothing, nothing. Average men. No conclusive signs. Will’s thinking about how any one of these men could have been her father, friends of her father’s, traveling from site to site, looking for work. The letters are poorly spelled, all punched out with little formatting on plain paper in plain font. Blue-collar guys like her family. Didn’t graduate high school, or barely finished, or got a workforce certification instead. Never had to write a formal essay to get into college. Normal Minnesota guys. Nothing whatsoever of note. And then -- _ah._

“What did you say your names were?” the secretary demands, just as Will pulls a single letter out of the file like a rabbit out of a hat, triumphant.

“Garret Jacob Hobbs,” she announces.

“...One of our pipe threaders,” the secretary replies, annoyed. “Those are all the resignation letters. Plumbers’ union requires them whenever members finish a job.” She informs her friend that she’ll call her back and steps out from behind her desk, defensive.

“Did Mr. Hobbs have a daughter?” Will asks.

“Might have.”

“Eighteen or nineteen? Uh, wind-chafed? Plain but pretty?” She’s realizing these are not actually great descriptors unless she’s writing a romance novel. “Uh, she would have auburn hair. About --” she gestures, “this tall.”

“Maybe!” The secretary shrugs, irritable. “I don’t know. I don’t keep company with these people.”

“What is it about Garret Jacob Hobbs that you find so peculiar?” Dr. Lecter inquires. Will had almost forgotten she was there.

“Left a phone number, no address.”

“Therefore he has something to hide?”

Will shrugs. She doesn’t want to make it seem too heavy -- if she’s wrong then she’s wrong, and she doesn’t want to humiliate herself. But she’s rarely wrong. “Everyone else left an address.” She turns to the secretary, who is clearly very ready for her to leave. “You have an address for Mr. Hobbs?”

Actually getting the address is like pulling teeth, but Will manages, and writes it down on a Post-It note. They start hauling file boxes from the office out to the rental, and while the secretary is at first extremely opposed, eventually she acquiesces, and starts carrying them out with them. Will hardly expects a woman like Dr. Lecter to be suited to hefting twenty-pound boxes in and out of a camper office (who wears heels to a construction site?), and her expectations are confirmed when Lecter trips on her way out the door and spills a full box of files over the railing of the steps and essentially onto the secretary’s head.

“I got it,” Will says wearily, waving away the doctor’s embarrassed attempts to help pick up the fallen paper. “Go grab another box, I’ll take care of this one.” Lecter ducks back into the office, and Will and the now positively irate secretary clear up the mess left in her wake.

 

-

 

The drive to Hobbs’ house isn’t long, and Will spends so much of it lost in thought that she’s almost surprised when they arrive. She unbuckles her seatbelt and starts to open the door, then pauses when she sees Dr. Lecter do the same.

“Wait,” she says, and Lecter stills. “Stay here for a second, okay? Until I clear everything. I need to make sure it’s safe.” Lecter clearly thinks this is silly, but nods and settles into her seat anyway. Will climbs out of the car and strides across the grass, and then the front door opens and a screaming, bleeding woman is flung across the threshold, and Will breaks into a dead sprint to kneel over her. Her slick red hand reaches out to grasp at Will’s face, at her wrists, and then she goes still and cold and Will has to fucking move.

She smashes into the door with her right shoulder. Harder. Again. She kicks it dead in the center, once, twice, until it gives way, and shouts, “Garret Jacob Hobbs? FBI!”

She storms further into the house, leading with her pistol, and in the kitchen she finds Hobbs clutching a pretty brunette teenager to his chest, knife at her throat. The girl is crying, gasping for air, trying to struggle out of her father’s arms. Hobbs looks Will dead in the eye and cuts her throat. It takes everything she has not to scream.

Instead she shoots. And again. And again. She watches Hobbs collapse against the counter and keeps shooting, round after round, until the light starts to leave his eyes. His shirt is riddled with holes and bloodstained, and he looks Will directly in the eye and hisses:

_“See? See?”_

Will drops to the floor. The knees of her jeans are covered with Hobbs’ daughter’s blood.

“Shit, it’s okay. It’s okay,” Will gasps out, hurried. The girl looks like a fish out of water, between the gaping hole in her neck and her harsh, jagged attempts to breathe, her rolling eyes trying to get a glimpse of her father’s corpse. Will’s gripping ineffectually onto her neck, trying to hold it together. She has to hold it together. She has to save this girl, she has to, she has to. She’s crying a little bit trying to get the flaps of skin to close, both in frustration and fear, and she wants to scream so fucking much but she can’t because there’s a high school girl in her arms who’s about to die, and then long, smooth hands push hers off of the girl’s neck gently, and Will looks up into the serene focus of Dr. Lecter’s face.

Lecter elevates the girl’s head, stemming the bleeding somewhat. “Call 911,” she instructs.

Will does.

 

-

 

The paramedics are a circus. Someone has put a shock blanket on Will. Her clothes and glasses are spattered in blood. Lecter has climbed into the ambulance with the paramedics, holding close to the Hobbs girl’s hand. Will tried to get in with them but was warned away by the medics. She stands around in her blanket for a minute, trying to get her bearings, and then drives off while everyone’s trying to tell her not to.

After a tremendous period of waiting, she’s allowed into the room where the girl -- Abigail -- is resting. Annabel is there with her. They are both asleep; Abigail’s electrocardiogram beats a steady rhythm. Someone has given Annabel the time to change into a clean sweater; the fabric and the lines of her face are soft in sleep. Slowly, Will pulls up a chair beside her, careful not to wake her. She wakes up anyway.

“Will,” she smiles. “A pleasure to see that you made it.”

“Apparently you’re not supposed to drive while you’re in shock.”

“And yet look at what you have achieved.” Will ducks her head, grinning a little, and Annabel’s smile widens. “Are you tired, Will?”

She is -- a bones-deep exhaustion that pervades every particle of her body. She doesn’t necessarily want to divulge that to Annabel, though. Instead she shrugs a little, noncommittal. She is too surprised to start back in her chair, or even move, when Annabel reaches over and takes her hand gently, holding it in her lap. With Will’s hand in her right and Abigail’s in her left, she links them all together like the last piece of a chain. Like a family.

“Sleep,” Annabel says softly. “We’ll stay with her for now. She’s safe. You saved her.”

“You saved her,” Will mutters. “I just watched.”

“We both did,” Annabel replies, brooking no argument. “Sleep now, Will. It will be better when you wake.”

She wants to argue. Instead, Will drifts into sleep, anchored by the slim fingers wrapped around her palm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And...that's Apéritif done with. Stay tuned.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, I did not die! I have an upper respiratory infection and have just started school (so I'm close to death, but not quite there) but still love my dear lesbians. Here we go.

After she shoots Hobbs, Will practices shooting more.

At the range every day for a week. Round after round. Trying so fucking hard to kill the bastard on the first shot. Every shot another frustration. Every bullet another coil of tension in her back. Shooting until the knife wound in her shoulder screams and she drops her pistol to the floor. Every day, Garret Jacob Hobbs, grinning at her with dead-fish eyes and jagged yellow teeth, demanding to know if she can fucking _see._

She wants to know what the fuck she is supposed to be seeing.

Usually after this she visits Abigail, who, by all her doctors’ accounts, will not wake up for a very long time. She does it alone, like a ritual, like visiting a grave. She holds her hand like Annabel did, imagines Annabel holding hers, grounding. She doubts it would be appropriate to request that a colleague, barely an acquaintance, accompany her to the hospital for the purpose of holding her hand like it’s her first day of kindergarten, no matter how much some flicker in the back of her brain wants to believe that maybe she finds you interesting in a sense other than wanting to pin you to a board and examine you through a microscope. In a sense that maybe in some life where she was less elegant, less competent at everything, remotely more like you, she would want to be your friend.

Will shakes her head and then stops abruptly, as if doing so would disturb Abigail. She can hear her daddy -- _Earth to Willa, c’min, Willa._ She’s coming up quick on her afternoon class.

She walks in, shockingly, to applause, and her shoulders tighten and she hunches in on herself a little bit. “Thank you,” she says first, in a pinched voice, and then, louder, “Please stop that.”

The clapping slowly peters out, and she can actually give her lecture. _Bad bookkeeping and dumb luck._ She shows them how she caught Hobbs completely on coincidence. She shows them the bloodstained kitchen, amid gasps, which she rebukes sharply -- _This is every day in the FBI. If you don’t like it, drop out now._ She shows them the body of Cassie Boyle. And then class is over, and there is, thank God, no more applause. They all leave and, like clockwork, Alana Bloom and Jack Crawford arrive in their place.

Alana is apologetic. Jack is not.

“I want you to go back in the field,” Jack informs her. “But I told the Board I’m recommending a psych evaluation.”

Will almost growls, shoulders bunching uncomfortably around her ears. Alana looks absolutely penitent.

“Are we starting now?”

“The session wouldn’t be with me,” Alana interjects quickly, before Jack has a chance to speak.

“Annabel Lecter might be a better fit,” Jack pronounces, glancing sideways at Alana. “Your relationship’s not as personal. But if you’d be more comfortable with Dr. Bloom --”

“I’m not going to be comfortable with anybody inside my head,” Will snaps.

“You’ve never killed someone before, Will.” Alana’s voice is placating, almost motherly. “It’s a deadly force encounter. It’s a lot to digest.”

“I used to work homicide. I’ve got a good metabolism.”

“Reason you currently _used to_ work homicide is you couldn’t stomach pulling the trigger,” Jack barks. “You just pulled the trigger _ten times.”_

The only thing stopping Will from rolling her eyes is that she doesn’t need to feel any more like a teenager in the principal’s office. “So the psych eval isn’t a formality?”

“It’s so I can sleep,” Jack replies, a little more calmly. “I asked you to get close to Hobbs and I need to know you didn’t get too close. How many times have you spent the night in Abigail Hobbs’ hospital room?”

Alana winces a little, and Will swallows hard and changes the subject. “Therapy doesn’t work on me.”

“‘Cause you won’t let it.”

“‘Cause I know all the tricks.”

“Unlearn some tricks.”

Alana sighs heavily and interrupts. “Why not have a conversation with Annabel. She was there. She knows what you went through.”

“Come on, Will,” Jack insists. _“I need my beauty sleep!”_

Will snorts a little, and Alana smiles, and Jack bustles back off to her office, presumably to make Will an appointment.

 

-

 

Annabel’s door swings wide to reveal her awaiting Will with a crisp, polite smile. It seems like the three-piece skirt suits are permanently grafted to her body.

“Good evening. Please come in.”

“Do you ever wear pants?” Will demands, and then immediately turns bright red. “Jesus, sorry, I --”

Annabel’s lips quirk at her abruptness, and she almost laughs. “Sometimes. I find that skirts and hose tend to put patients more at ease. A full suit is too much, particularly on a woman of my age.”

“You’re hardly that old.”

“You’d be surprised.” Annabel steps back, ushering Will inside. “To many, a woman of forty-five might as well be a woman of ninety.”

“That’s stupid.”

“I don’t disagree.” She pulls out a fine-looking wooden chair for Will in front of a gargantuan mahogany desk, waits for her to sit, and then seats herself across from her in a wide-backed revolving chair upholstered in leather the color of blood. The office is dark, imposing, nothing like Alana’s cool blue walls adorned with paintings of flowers. Annabel’s office is all deep reds, browns, and grays, with two modern black leather chairs, a comfortable-looking gray chaise, and a pale turquoise Victorian-style couch, the only pop of color in what almost strikes Will as a kind of lair. A wooden ladder that looks like something one would find in a barn leads up to an elegant catwalk, alongside which every wall is lined with heavy, finely bound books. Will is reminded, suddenly, that she is in Annabel’s home, and that this office is an extension of everything else -- in a way, of the woman herself.

Annabel clears her throat softly and slides Will a thick piece of letterhead. It is already fully typed, as though she had prepared it prior to Will’s arrival; the only fresh thing on it is the large, crisp signature of _Dr. Annabel Lecter, PSY.D., M.D._ FINAL RECOMMENDATION: SUITABLE FOR ACTIVE FIELD SERVICE.

“...What’s this?”

“Your psychological evaluation. You’re totally functional and more or less sane. Well done.”

Will blinks down at it, surprised. “Did you just rubber-stamp me?”

“Jack Crawford may lay her weary head to rest knowing she didn’t break you, and our conversation may proceed unobstructed by paperwork.”

Will studies her a moment, looks into her calm face.

“Jack thinks I need therapy.”

“I’m not sure therapy will work on you,” Annabel replies blithely. “Stealing into other minds has taught you how to fortify your own.”

“That’s what I told her.”

“What you _need_ is a way out of dark places when Jack sends you there.”

It’s simple, shockingly so. Will squeezes her hand around the phantom sensation of Annabel’s fingers twined with her own. Safe, comfortable, quicker and easier than falling asleep.

“Last time she sent me into a dark place, I brought something back.”

“A surrogate daughter?”

Will is not here to talk about her motherhood anxiety. She lets it slide -- doesn’t argue, but isn’t inclined to allow Annabel to push the subject, either. “Not ‘cause I got too close to Hobbs.”

“You saved Abigail Hobbs’ life -- you also orphaned her. It comes with certain emotional obligations, regardless of empathy disorders.”

Will prickles and stands up quickly, pushing back in her chair. “You were there too,” she snaps, in spite of herself. “You saved her life too. Do you feel _obligated?”_

“I feel a staggering amount of obligation,” Annabel replies. She looks up at Will, still unshakably calm, entirely honest. “I feel responsibility. I’ve fantasized about scenarios where my actions may have allowed a different fate for Abigail Hobbs.”

Will stares at her, melts a little. Annabel stares back. Neither blinks.

“Jack thinks Abigail Hobbs might have killed those girls.” She hadn’t wanted to think about it -- it had almost been an offhand remark, when they had gone to see where Hobbs was killing. She had pushed it to the back of her mind, almost repressed it. But she can’t not tell Annabel, not when she’s looking at Will like that. As raw as she is now.

“How does that make you feel?”

Will remembers, abruptly, that she is talking to a psychiatrist.

“How does it make _you_ feel?”

The doctor’s nose wrinkles, just a little. “I find it vulgar.”

Will sighs. “Me, too.”

 _“And_ entirely possible.”

“It’s not what happened.”

“Jack will ask her when she wakes up or she’ll have one of us ask her.”

“Is this therapy or a support group?” Will demands.

“It’s whatever you need it to be.” It may literally be impossible to get a rise out of this woman. “Will, the mirrors in your mind can reflect the best of yourself, and not the worst of someone else.”

She doesn’t think she’s ever actually heard that before.

Annabel takes her hand again while she’s still processing. “I am here to help you, Will. Not as your doctor, but as your friend.” She glances at her watch. “I believe our hour is up, however. You are welcome to stay for dinner if you like.”

“I - I should go.”

“Perhaps you should. It’s been a very long day, has it not?” She rises and takes Will gently by the shoulder, leading her in the direction of the door. “Sleep well. Don’t let this keep you awake.”

“I won’t.”

“Good.” Annabel smiles. “Until we see each other next.”

Her grip on Will’s hand turns into a courteous handshake, and she closes the door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Would y'all be interested in a chapter from Annabel's perspective, or would you prefer we stick with Will? I'm deeply torn.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Annabel's perspective, just briefly.

Dr. Lecter mulls over whether she would have preferred Will stay for dinner while she poaches the sweetbreads of a farmer’s market greengrocer.

On the one hand, opened up and vulnerable as the young woman had been, she could be more open to suggestion. Influence. Annabel wants badly to sink her nails into that pretty brain, find out what ticks behind Will Graham’s shining blue eyes. Take her apart and reassemble her in the shape of what Annabel knows full well, deep in her chest, that she could be.

On the other hand, she’s not quite sure what she wants to do with her yet.

She fishes the soft organ meat delicately out of the steam and into a ready pot of cold water, then begins to remove its various gristles. What to do with Will, indeed. She has no direct precedent. Annabel has never encountered a person quite like her before. Offenses for which she would rend another person’s flesh roll off her back like water from Will’s mouth. The chemical sting of her cheap cologne appalls, but in such a way that it makes her hungry for what Will must smell like underneath. It is difficult to resist the urge to nose into the crook of her neck and breathe deep there, to tease out the warm animal scent of her body.

She realizes that she is being very, very foolish about this while she rolls the sweetbreads in herbs and flour.

Involvement with a woman would hardly be new -- in fact, Annabel has scarcely been with a man whatsoever in the last two decades. When necessary for appearances, she is not opposed to a man on her arm; however, it is women, generally, whom she is genuinely capable of laying low with love, and whom she is capable of mustering fondness for. Handsome women, particularly; her first Florentine lover, thirty-six to her nineteen, was strong, sharp-jawed, perfectly pressed and ironed in a way Annabel herself had not yet mastered. And it had ended as it began -- the woman sweet on Annabel’s tongue.

But Will is not like her, nor like any of Annabel’s American women. She in all her rumpled suspicion is hardly liable to come tumbling head over boots into her quasi-psychiatrist’s lap. No, she and her dog hair and cheap plaid and her sidelong glances would have to be drawn in slowly, when she was least expecting it. Annabel would have to creep into her through the craquelure of her heart. 

And still, she muses, as her sweetbreads crackle in the pan, she will have to be crafted into something usable, sharpened as one would a kitchen knife. Will has been blunted by the Bureau into a weapon of brute force; it will be entirely upon Annabel’s shoulders to form her into the sort of sword to which one could bow before a fight with honor intact. 

She is physically desirous of Will, certainly, of the scent and heat and presumably taste of her -- she wishes to roll her on her tongue like a small bird -- but at the end of the day it will be her brain that must be cracked open like a ribcage, for Annabel to climb inside and possess her. As she dips into the creamy sweetness of the grocer’s pancreas with buttered bread, spreading it with her fork, she retreats into her mind and plans out how she will do it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's a short one, but I think brevity is the soul of wit, here. Dr. Lecter was not much up for talking.


End file.
